Glimpses: The Missing 5th Floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel, Pyonghang

The always-useful NK News alerted us to Business Insider photo feature of pictures of a Kaesong trip, which passes through the JSA. Among the highlights: a gaggle of tourists getting their photo-op with a North Korean soldier and a weird propaganda poster of an elderly man or woman standing behind barbed wire, shaking a fist and saying “Get revenge a thousand hundred times against the Americans.”

Then we noticed that the propaganda poster was simply one of a whole suite of them, and the story got much more interesting.

Columbia University graduate Calvin Sun student had smuggled a video camera into the country and was staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyonghang. The fifth floor is missing from the elevator panel, but although off-limits to hotel guests was accessible by the stairway. Sun found a virtual gallery of propaganda posters; a few examples below.

The obvious question: what’s up on the fifth floor anyway?

Translation: "This bomb is the product of the Americans. Every product of the Americans is our enemy. Get revenge a thousand hundred times against the Americans."